Page 39 - The GSE Report March-April 2018

FANNIE MAE MJARN.U-ARPYR.20210818
We now have our agile teams—we call them squads. They consist of about seven to nine people, and they’re empowered to solve a problem, collaborate, and test and learn with customers. It could be a large problem that could take two years to solve, or it could be a small problem that takes three months.
We are customer-insight driven, meaning we collect insights from our customers before
we start building. From those insights, we’re able to develop a hypothesis. Then, we pull our customers into those discussions, and we validate those hypotheses through testing and learning. This is a big change for us because in the past we would build what we thought our customers wanted, and get something into production. Then there would be,
in some cases, little to no value, because we didn’t start innovating with the customer at the beginning of the process. A part of this operating model is to pull a series of customers into that problem-solving process so you get their point of view and you put yourself in their shoes. We co-create with them.
Being agile and working in what we call two-week sprints, we’re always able to have customers looking at what we’re building. It could be wireframes; it could be prototypes; it could be working software. But every two weeks, we get some customer input on what we’re doing. That allows us to pivot quickly. That’s part of our agile journey, and that’s pulling our customer into our agile journey.
Lastly, for some of our innovations, we do a series of test-and-learn pilots where we’re
able to run, concurrent, a number of concepts and get that feedback from our customers as they’re using it. When we call something a pilot, it’s a piece of code that is in production that customers use. Did it add the value that we think it did? We’re very metrics driven now, so any pilot we enter, we’ve got a customer hypothesis and a series of metrics we use to manage and measure value.
What are some of the technologies that you think have the potential to reshape the industry?
The move to the cloud. You get a different perspective on resilience and security because all of that’s built in. Cloud, for us, has been transformative. It also makes you build things differently. You don’t build these big applications anymore. You build smaller, which is important.
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